Where Biology Meets the Feed

Reclaiming protein and tuning into the underground signals

May 13, 2025

This Week at Biodesign Academy

Dear reader,

A few quiet things we’ve released and refined recently, from a new toolkit for navigating biotech research papers, to updates on the archive and a soft podcast launch.

If you’re curious where things are headed or just looking for a place to re-ground, here’s what’s new:

🧪 Reclaiming Protein: From Nutrient Myth to Design Medium

Our most recent open-access article is now live.

It looks at how protein has been flattened into the role of “nutrient,” and why we might instead begin to understand it as a design material, one that can carry meaning, structure, and signal across disciplines.

The piece invites a rethink of how protein fits into speculative and applied biodesign, and why that matters at a time when AI, material science, and biology are rapidly converging.

🧰 How to Find Biotech Papers: A Toolkit for Designers

This new piece builds on Biodesigners’ Guide to Reading Biotech Papers, which focused on how to understand dense scientific articles from a design perspective.

This one is a more practical, toolkit-driven follow-up, focused on how to actually find, screen, and work with research papers that might spark or shape your project.

Many of the most exciting biodesign signals still begin in academic publications, long before they show up in public exhibitions or product roadmaps. But if you’re not from a biology background, it’s easy to feel shut out.

This new resource aims to open that door a bit wider. Inside you’ll find:

  • ✅ A checklist for quickly assessing if a paper is relevant to design practice

  • 🤖 A Custom GPT prompt to screen abstracts and suggest speculative directions

  • 📊 A Notion + Airtable tracker to save, tag, and reflect on papers you collect

  • 🧪 A Streamlit web app version (for workshops or fast testing in the browser)

  • 🖥️ A Python CLI script for more advanced or bulk screening

The goal here isn’t to become a biotechnologist. It’s to read for opportunity, and to build a habit of engaging with science through a creative, critical lens.

→ The toolkit is available through the Foundational Tier, along with the previous “how to read” guide. Feedback always welcome.

📚 Biodesign Academy Archive Update:

We’re approaching 50 open-access posts, a mix of essays, interviews, toolkits, and reflections.

If you’re new here or haven’t browsed in a while, the full archive is worth a look.

On the paid side, the continuously expanding archive of Foundational Tier now includes 4 articles and toolkits, including:

  • How to Find Biotech Papers: Using a Creative Lens to Score, Scan, and Sketch from Science

  • Biodesigner's Guide to Reading Biotech Papers: How to Separate Design-Relevant Insights from Technical Noise

  • AI for Regenerative Design: Introducing AlphaFold 3

  • Should We Compute or Cultivate?: AI, Biodesign, and the Real Environmental Trade-Offs

Every week we’ll add new resources to the archives.

We’re also rebuilding the archive system with better tags, filters, and search to make navigation easier as the collection grows. More soon.

🎧 Biodesign Academy Podcast

Did you know Biodesign Academy has a podcast?

It’s a micro-pod series co-hosted by AI-cloned voices of “EJ” and “Charlotte,” with 1–2 short episodes released each week, designed to quietly accompany our newsletter and blog.

We’ve already released 7 short episodes you can binge-listen anytime, covering themes around AI, biodesign, creative research, and speculative practice.

Each one is under 10 minutes and built for thinkers working between disciplines.

If you’ve given it a listen, I’d really appreciate your thoughts, even one line of feedback helps shape where this goes next.

✅ Biodesign x AI Checklist: Still Available (and Iterating)

The toolkit we shared last week, “Should I Use AI for This?”, is still available.

It was developed out of our recent article exploring the tensions between AI use and sustainability in biodesign.

In particular we focus on how energy costs, carbon emissions, and invisible infrastructure might complicate otherwise exciting computational tools in biodesign.

The checklist is a lightweight tool to help you evaluate when AI might actually add value, and when cultivating low-tech or biology-first methods might make more sense.

It’s already been helpful for a couple of students and an early-stage team trying to clarify project direction. If you’ve had a chance to try it, I’d really appreciate your feedback.

→ Download the checklist here
→ Or reply and tell me what you’d want in a v2.

Thanks for reading, and for being part of this.

Everything we’re building: toolkits, posts, podcasts, and courses, is in service of helping people work more thoughtfully and creatively at the intersection of biology, AI, and design.

Your feedback and quiet encouragement makes a big difference.

More soon,
Raphael

Founder, Biodesign Academy.

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